Menu

Category Archives: Holocaust

When we talk about the Holocaust, we are talking about the mass murder of millions of Jews.

The dead included my grandparents and countless others, shot, starved, gassed, beaten to death and buried in mass graves. And yet the lessons of the Holocaust in its commemorations rarely have anything to do with Jewish lives.

A Holocaust survivor has revealed how he escaped the Auschwitz gas chambers by outwitting Dr Josef Mengele, known as the ‘Angel of Death’.

Leslie Kleinman, 88, whose concentration camp number is still tattooed on his forearm, has told MailOnline for the first time about the heart-stopping encounter with one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious sadists in 1944.

A picture taken shortly before the war shows a happy family. By the end of the War, Mr Kleinman was the only survivor – and he managed it by fooling Mengele into the belief that he was older than he actually was.

A retired FBI agent has launched a cold case review into identifying those who may have betrayed the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family to the Gestapo in 1944.

Investigative techniques developed in the past decade, including the crunching of big data to uncover leads, are to be used by a team of 19 forensic experts led by Vince Pankoke.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has made available its archives and welcomed the initiative, which is being filmed and chronicled online, as the investigators, including historians, psychological profilers and former police detectives, work through the evidence.

In 1963, after legendary Mossad chief Isser Harel resigned and was replaced by Meir Amit, the department in charge of monitoring anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi organizations and individuals was asked to prepare a list of Nazi war criminals which had to be “dealt with.”

The list was prepared following unprecedented administrative work conducted by the Amal department. At first, it included names of famous Nazi war criminals who had taken part in the annihilation of the Jewish people as well as the less known criminals who had carried out the murders themselves.

TEL AVIV — For decades, Israel’s espionage agency, the Mossad, kept a file on Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor responsible for, among other atrocities, selecting which new inmates at Auschwitz would die immediately in the gas chambers and which would be put to work first or subjected to his horrible “medical” experiments.

The file is thousands of pages long and documents the Mossad’s efforts to capture or assassinate the war criminal: countless hours of labor, huge sums of money, scores of agents and sources, wiretaps, break-ins, secret photographs and just about every other ploy in the espionage tool kit, including recruiting Nazis and journalists.

What is the best way to shut down the debate on immigration? By heightening the language to levels impossible to be debated. That is what has been happening in the new — and false — trend of comparing the waves of migrants arriving in Europe to Jews during the Holocaust.

Since 1958, a small department of Germany’s government has sought to bring members of the Third Reich to trial. A handful of prosecutors are still tracking down Nazis, but the world’s biggest cold-case investigation will soon be shut down.

The Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes is an austere, pale-yellow prison building nestled into the 18th-century city wall of Ludwigsburg in southwestern Germany. Once used by the Nazis to detain political prisoners, the building announces its contemporary tenants obliquely, with a small, silver sign. Entering the Central Office still feels like entering a jail; to gain access, one must pass through a white metal gate and then through a second secure doorway.

Since it was created by the West German government in 1958, the Central Office’s mission has been to deliver Nazis to justice. Every year, its six investigative “departments,” each of which consists of a single prosecutor, scour the globe looking for members of the Third Reich. Chief prosecutor Jens Rommel, who heads the operation, is a sturdy, jovial 44-year-old with frameless glasses and a triangular goatee. The German press calls him a Nazi hunter, but Rommel doesn’t like the term. “A hunter is looking for a trophy,” he told me. “He has a rifle in his hand. I’m a prosecutor looking for murderers and I have criminal code in my hand.”

On Sunday, an Islamist leader in Australia compared the plight of Muslims in the West today to that of Jews in Germany leading up to the Holocaust. He suggested that Muslims face the same fear and hatred that led Adolf Hitler to try to exterminate the Jews, and warned that a similar evil might be employed against Muslims in the near future.

400 rabbis did not move FDR to save what was left of Europe’s Jews, nor were they helped by Reform Jews, whose descendants side with anti-Semites.

After a thousand petitions failed to move FDR, Orthodox rabbis here in America attempted a dramatic show of force to persuade the President to do something – anything. More than 400 from the United States and Canada took to the road to persuade FDR to use whatever means to save what was left.

They planned to meet the President at the White House. The least he could do was open America’s doors. The silent quota permitted no flow, only a trickle.

This was 1943. Millions of European Jews had already been put to death for being Jewish. More were being murdered by the hour.

The rabbis approached the White House on October 6. The President could not be bothered. He left for vacation and there was no meeting.

War crimes files revealing early evidence of Holocaust death camps that was smuggled out of eastern Europe are among tens of thousands of files to be made public for the first time this week.

The once-inaccessible archive of the UN war crimes commission, dating back to 1943, is being opened by the Wiener Library in London with a catalogue that can be searched online.

The files establish that some of the first demands for justice came from countries that had been invaded, such as Poland and China, rather than Britain, the US and Russia, which eventually coordinated the post-war Nuremberg trials.

In their motion, the two residents said they found it too confrontational to have to constantly be reminded, because of the memorial cobblestone, of the deportation and murder of Elte, a 51-year-old accountant who died at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945. They also argued it “compromises the atmosphere” of their upscale neighborhood and their privacy and that of their children because it attracts onlookers.

“Fake news” has become a subject of real news. But there’s nothing new about “fake news.” Holocaust deniers have generated fake news for decades. The deniers have funded “research” “institutes,” “journals,” books, magazines, videos, websites, newsflashes – all designed to provide a patina of academic respectability to demonstrable falsehoods.

This entire enterprise is devoted to proving that the holocaust – the systematic murder of more than six million Jews in gas chambers, mass shootings, mobile killing units and other means of implementing the carefully planned genocide – simply did not occur. It was made up whole cloth out of “The Jews” for financial and political gain.